Miming robots

Students in Prof. Michael O’Neill’s FYS 082: Staging Science, Playing Technology have been reading and discussing prescient literature about robots and our daily, contemporary interactions involving robots.

Over the lunch hour on Oct. 20, all 13 of his students reimagined their classroom experience by slipping on Lafayette hoodies and metallic masks, silently moving among other students outside Farinon College Center, mechanically miming robotic movements.

Merging STEM and performance, O’Neill, professor of theater, encouraged the robotic miming “as a good way for students to understand the relationship between disciplines and have respect for them. By knowing what people are doing, we’re all just trying to make the world a better place.”

O’Neill said his students relished the interactions as they observed the curious reactions from the midday crowd at Farinon.

“I’m always looking for ways to make an artistic impulse to imagine and create things and merge it with science,” O’Neill said. “As with the performing arts, we get to places in science when we imagine and create.”